The New York Times did a piece on a two new virtual universe exploring programs: one from Microsoft and a web-based expansion of Google Sky.
Sorry if it got posted elsewhere.
Your second link is a little messed up.
I was reading about this earlier. Downloading the Microsoft client now because it looks absolutely fascinating. I’ll probably lose a few hours looking around.
Thanks for the info.
I saw a presentation on this yesterday at a “Tech Tuesday” in Waltham given by some Microsoft guy. It looked kind of meh, but admittedly the guy had just played around with it a little bit before showing it himself, so he might not have known all the features. He zoomed into a smeary ugly looking Jupiter and showed a few constellations, that was it.
If you’ve downloaded it, does it have some kind of selection and projection capability, so you can say something like “show all F and G stars in a volume within 20 light years of Sol”? Can you rotate spatial volumes? How good is selection of objects within a 3D volume?